Inside The Rothschild Chateau Left To Rot 5 Miles From Paris: Château Rothschild
In this documentary, we explore the true story of a country house designed by the man who built the Crystal Palace, for the richest private banker in nineteenth-century France, filled by three generations of the most successful Jewish banking dynasty in modern European history, stripped by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg in a matter of months in 1940, gifted to the French public after the Liberation, and left to fall down five miles from the centre of Paris for the eighty years since.
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The Rothschild fortune begins in the Judengasse, the Jewish alley, a narrow lane in Frankfurt am Main where the city's Jewish population had been legally confined since 1462, packed into a strip roughly three hundred metres long and four metres wide at its narrowest, sealed by gates that were locked at night and on Sundays and Christian holidays.
Mayer Amschel Rothschild was born there in 1744, began as a dealer in rare coins and old medals for the Landgrave William the Ninth of Hesse-Kassel, and when Napoleon's armies swept across the German states, the Landgrave entrusted a portion of his fortune to him for safekeeping, the transaction that lifted the family from the ghetto into the financial aristocracy of Europe.
James de Rothschild arrived in Paris in 1812 at the age of twenty, founded the Paris banking house de Rothschild Frères, won the concession for the Chemin de fer du Nord in 1845, and by the 1850s his personal fortune was estimated at six hundred million francs, an art collection said by contemporaries to rival the holdings of the Louvre, and no other private occupant of the same financial category in France.
He married his niece Betty von Rothschild in 1824, one of the twenty-nine cousin marriages among the fifty-eight contracted by descendants of Mayer Amschel between 1824 and 1877, a reproductive strategy for keeping the capital consolidated that had no parallel among the other great European banking dynasties.
Joseph Paxton was born in 1803 in Milton Bryan, Bedfordshire, the son of a farmer, began as a garden boy at Chatsworth under the sixth Duke of Devonshire, designed the Great Conservatory there in 1840, and produced the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park in a matter of days as a late competition entry, an iron and glass structure covering nineteen acres visited by over six million people in five months.
Construction of the château began in 1855 on a parcel of roughly thirty hectares rising above the Bois de Boulogne, in a hybrid style contemporaries called Anglo-Norman, steep slate roofs in the French manner, cut stone facades with panels of red brick, turrets and dormers and tall chimneys reading as the signature of a house of consequence from a considerable distance.
Paxton did not live to see the gardens mature and died on 8 June 1865, four years after the house was completed, and the remaining landscape work was overseen by his son-in-law George Henry Stokes, who had worked alongside him on the Crystal Palace.
James died on 15 November 1868, the property passed to Betty until 1886, then to Alphonse de Rothschild, and in 1905 to Édouard, who assembled paintings, drawings, sculpture, furniture, tapestries, porcelain, silver, enamels and objets d'art on a scale that made the château one of the most densely furnished and most intellectually curated private houses in France.
In June 1940 German forces entered Paris, and within weeks the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg began the systematic confiscation of Jewish-owned art collections across occupied France. More than five thousand works were seized from various Rothschild family properties, and the house James had built was among the very first properties stripped.
Rose Valland, a volunteer curator at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris, used her fluent German and photographic memory to compile a secret record of every work that passed through the building, where it came from, where it was being sent, and which Nazi official had claimed it, and her documentation would prove critical when the war ended.
After the Liberation, the Rothschild family donated the property to the département des Hauts-de-Seine, a transfer that looked generous on the day it was made and became, over the following decades, one of the most expensive unfunded obligations the département had ever accepted.
The roof was allowed to deteriorate, water entered the interior, windows were broken and not replaced, vandalism was systematic, the grounds reverted to scrub and bramble, and the formal landscape that had once been among the most admired private gardens near Paris was buried under decades of unmanaged growth.